What Is Student Imposter Syndrome?

At some point in college, you may begin to feel as if you are not smart or creative enough to succeed. That moment might fall after a midterm exam or while writing your first college paper. You may look around you and see other students achieving strong grades and approaching projects with confidence that you do not have.

You may find yourself intimidated by the motivation, maturity, and talent of the other students accepted at your college. You may begin to feel as if you are a bit of a fraud, that the admissions office made a mistake when they let you into college. This experience I am describing has a name—it’s called imposter syndrome.

When you are struggling with imposter syndrome, you do more than “compare and despair.” In your cold sweat, you forget. You forget the successes you’ve experienced and the obstacles you’ve overcome to get to college. You forget how many high school classes you began as a novice yet completed in triumph. Yeah, but that was back in high school, you say, this is college and I’m completely out of my league now. If you were almost effortlessly successful in high school, I’m not surprised you feel that way.

Yes, you may have been able to succeed without struggling. In fact, you may have realized you had intelligence and talent primarily because it took so little effort to get that A. If so, you weren’t wrong; however, you probably weren’t challenged either.

College classrooms sit you next to your peers, individuals who were also largely successful and high-achieving high school students. It will be easy to compare the success they project to the insecurity you feel—to compare their outsides to your insides. The truth is that many, many students experience imposter syndrome. It is unlikely that you are alone and it is unnecessary for you to suffer alone.

Many college professors, teaching assistants, and advisors intend to help you learn outside the classroom in office hours, study sessions, and tutorials. Your school likely has a learning resource center or a tutoring service that can help you adjust in the first few weeks of a new course as you get familiar with the lectures, problem sets, assignments, and exams.

When you catch yourself allowing yourself to be intimidated or giving up in discouragement, remember what you have already achieved and remember that you are not alone. Learning may look and feel a lot less successful in college than it did in high school, but you can adjust and you can succeed because you belong.